Intellectual properties are recognized as valuable assets in many fields of business. As such, the ability to quickly harvest, discover, analyze and document intellectual properties has become a major goal for many companies and corporations.
However, many companies do not always have an enterprise view of the business processes and development works that are being planned or implemented. Consequently, many companies fail to properly discover potentially business-critical intellectual properties and/or new opportunities that may help them to innovate or solve their business problems.
Current methods of discovery rely mostly on managers and other responsible personnel to manually identify potential intellectual properties. For example, project managers may review and rate invention disclosures to determine their worth. However, such decisions are typically made in an ad-hoc manner and may be prone to the personal biases of the decision maker. Further, such decisions are often made without considering or valuing various existing enterprise business processes and interests.